A contrarian blog, because the majority is wrong about a lot of stuff.

December 09, 2012

Pure nerd

Click here to see a photo of Brian Kernighan, the guy who wrote the book about C, the programming language.

He's a pretty nerdy-looking guy. He's currently a professor at Princeton University, which demonstrates one benefit of attending college at an elite university like Princeton; you get to be taught by semi-famous people.

Hey, Half, fuck you. When you're seventy years old you'll be remembered, if at all, for some cynical posts on career choices and NAMs. Kernighan helped create the modern computer software industry. He should be recognized and celebrated as much as Steve Jobs is.

[HS: I am letting the personal insult go because you are right, Kernighan, and other important contributors to computer science deserve more fame than they get. Our capitalist society only respects the guys like Jobs and Gates who became rich, while genuine value creators who invented the C language, but didn't get any money from it because they were employees, are old forgotten college professors.]

How come Deadheads, who often look exactly like this, don't get called Nerds? And, he's actually better-looking than, say, George Lucas. If he had Lucas' money or anything near it, I could see him tooling down the road in a 365 Ferrari with a luscious blonde, can't you?

If anything, I would say that figures like Kernighan and the late McCarthy, plus the late Unix/C inventor Dennis Ritchie, have (and had) the look of many venerable figures in CS/Math (e.g. John Conway). Too bad hipsters have appropriated those thick rimmed glasses that McCarthy wore until the end of his life, though...

My use of "mad scientist" is only in the most respectful terms. Look at McCarthy here: couldn't you just imagine him planning to takeover the world with an army of robots equipped with his A.I. (programmed in LISP, of course). Einstein similarly had the look of the deep thinker (an all too rare visage among the dull crowd of today). McCarthy had the look of the mad scientist while remaining, in reality, the definition of rationality.